Readily available frameworks and APIs can make developers very productive. However, they can also limit developers' imagination, explains Overstock.com principal software engineer Chris Maki in this brief audio interview with Artima.

Small bugs can sometimes lead to significant failures, especially when those bugs appear in production code. In this interview with Artima, Mark Thomas, Director of Java Technologies at IBM, talks about the potentially big implications of defects discovered only in a production environment, and what developers can do to mitigate such problems.

This article discusses how the RIFE Web framework, and its use of continuations to maintain conversational state, integrates with the open-source Terracotta clustering project to create highly scalable applications with minimal coding.

Rich clients can not only provide more interactive, desktop-like, user interaction, but also have the ability to cache significant amounts of application data on the client and perform processing on that data. In this interview with Artima, Xoetrope CTO Val Cassidy explains how client-side data processing can help scale an enterprise application.

Business managers often rely on developers to obtain custom reports, or to implement business logic that operates on some enterprise data. Assisting management in such piecemeal projects is tedious and unrewarding for developers, argues Enterprise Wizard CEO Colin Earl in an Artima interview.

In this interview with Artima, Loren Corbridge, manager of Sybase's Eclipse-based IDE, talks about developers' increasing involvement in a variety of business and management tasks, such as data and business analysis, and about developers' changing roles in the enterprise.

In this interview with Artima, Andrius Strazdauskas, Gary Duncanson, and Daniel Brookshier of No Magic discuss the goals of Model Driven Architecture, or MDA, and explain why they think it can improve programmer productivity and software quality.

In this interview with Artima, David Intersimone, Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist at CodeGear, discusses the role of designing software using visual tools as opposed to coding.

Portlets define a streamlined way to aggregate content from several sources into a single Web application. In this interview with Artima, Brian Chan, chief architect of open-source portlet vendor Liferay, describes the use-cases for portlets.

Using Ajax toolkits is a popular way to make JSF components more interactive. But multiple Ajax toolkits on the client can produce unintended consequences, explains ICESoft's Steve Maryka in this interview with Artima.